Call It The Caviar Kingdom

A Miami-based food importer, Marky's Caviar, is starting a fish farm in Central Florida to raise prized beluga sturgeon from the Caspian Sea for their gourmet eggs.

Why go through the hassle, when you can import the caviar directly?

Company President Mark Zaslavsky said he's worried about shrinking supplies from the Caspian Sea, partly because of over-fishing there.

In March, he announced an accord with Russian caviar producer Raskat to buy beluga, osetra and sevruga without killing adult female sturgeon. It also required DNA batch tests for each species of caviar, verified by the Russian Federation's council on trade in endangered species.

For more than a year, Don Hayden, managing partner of Baker & McKenzie's Brickell Avenue office, had been looking for new digs to accommodate the growing law firm's 25 attorneys and 60 staffers. The firm wanted to stay on Brickell.

So when a space became vacant on the same street, it was everything -- and more -- than Hayden was looking for: The state-of-the-art floor of offices at the Mellon United Center at 1111 Brickell Ave. had new furniture, video-conferencing and high-end computer equipment. It also had a history -- as the former offices of Arthur Andersen.

When Hayden and staff members did a walk-through, he said, they noticed that nameplates were still on the doors, and "it was kind of eerie to realize that an operation like this was so full of activity and now it's like tumbleweeds going down the hall."

Even though paper shredders are not included in the deal, Hayden joked that "we'll get a shaman, priest and rabbi in there to do an exorcism before we move in."

Cindy Kent

HIGH PRAISE

Keeping it all in the family, Gov. Jeb Bush got more than a chuckle out of the 200-plus guests in Miami for this month's historic signing of a U.S.-Chile Free Trade Agreement.

Plus, he commended his "other favorite president," father George H.W. Bush, for first getting the concept rolling.

Still, Bush recognized his special place in Florida.

Speaking in Spanish and English, he called Florida the "front yard for our country, not the back yard," a border state destined to have "one foot firmly planted in Latin America and one foot firmly planted in North America."